John Updike: The Critical Response to the Rabbit Saga (Critical Responses in Arts and Letters Series) Book

This book is about so much more than the "Tragic Courtship and Marriage of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Ruth Moore." It is a deep look/analysis of the psychological (warfare) aspects of living in a time of constructed racism and its resulting oppression upon people of African descent. We are given the impact resulting from the internalization of those racist ideals, violence (the learned behavior) where the enslaved were brutally beaten daily through the scope of Paul's & Ruth lives/daily living.

Lyric of Sunshine and Shadow is a good but difficult read. It was powerful and tragically sad the personal, psychological, social, spiritual cost of those (people of African descent) living in a racist society where laws were specifically created to ensure, govern and uphold the racist ideology that perpetuated and encouraged notions of inferiority and superiority (blackness inferior/ whiteness superior) reinforced by the willful prevention of decent paying jobs/wages, healthcare, housing and education-the means to survival.

The author highlights and demonstrates through the narrative of Paul's/Alice's lived experiences how this deliberately normalized and institutionalized oppression, prejudice and willful discrimination permeates the homes, minds/psyche and body thus altering the way one view/see themselves and how this disintegration creates an alienation of the self and develops into an inferiority complex. I.e.: They (people of African descent) not liking what they see in the mirror the "blackness" of their skin, the texture of their hair, the broadness of their noses because these very features were the reasoning used by "supposed superiors" as a barrier to employment, healthcare, education, housing. Their very ethnicity/color became a burden, it became the hindrance thus many began to hate themselves (self-negation), anything Afrocentric that told/pointed to their lineage. Thus began the development of an inferiority complex.

Overall I enjoyed reading Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow because it explains so much of what we see in today's society, so much of what occurred then is still occurring now. Though we have come far, we still have far to go.